This invention relates to an intelligent alarm system for detecting hazardous situations in a building, informing building occupants of optimal escape routes or survival strategies and assisting emergency personnel in rescuing people inside the building. Building hazards, including fire, earthquakes, intruders, etc., have the potential for large numbers of casualties. Effective building alarm systems must have the capability to process a plurality of input types to determine the nature of the situation involving danger to persons in the building. The building alarm system must also have more than simple audio/visual outputs for helping people in the building find safe escape routes.
Use of the term building in this invention refers to any structure including, but not limited to, office buildings, commercial buildings, factory/warehouses, residential homes, etc. Aspects of building alarm systems are described in, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,686,434; 4,511,886; 3,634,846; 4,614,968; 4,775,853; 5,267,180; 5,281,951, each of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Detection of hazards that may exist in a building is crucial in the proper functioning of an intelligent building alarm system. Current sensor technology allows for the accurate monitoring of many building parameters including, but not limited to, carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons, temperature, vibration, etc. Accurate sensor readings using sophisticated sensor technology can minimize the occurrence of costly false alarms.
“Expert systems” are becoming more extensively used as a problem solving tool. An intelligent building alarm can benefit from the use of expert system concepts. Many different possibilities for hazards, and dealing with them, must be analyzed to adequately alert persons in a building of dangerous situations. Expert systems are designed to make use of pooled knowledge resources from a group of experienced persons having with considerable experience in diverse fields relating to emergency situations including, but not limited to, fire fighting, toxic fume detection, earthquake physics, human tolerance to hazards, medical problems, etc.
“Fuzzy logic” is a logic system that is a superset of Boolean logic. Since the world is primarily analog in nature, many situations cannot be adequately modeled using simple Boolean true/not true logic. Simply concluding that an event, element, or condition is either “X” or is not “X” is seldom adequate in making a complex decision. For example, the temperature in one room of a building during a fire in the building cannot simply be distinguished as a danger or not a danger. Other factors, such as gas concentration, smoke occurrence and density, flames, etc., also limit an analysis of possible danger when simply considered as, for instance, high danger or not high danger. Fuzzy logic helps model problems involving humanistic issues by allowing membership in more than one set and allowing a membership transition band from one set to another set.
A preferred alarm system will have the capability of transferring and processing data from one, more than one or many input devices. Current information networking technology provides for low cost and standardized hardware and software systems with the performance capacity to handle many input and/or output connections. A wire or cable based communications system will be used to facilitate communications within a single building or, also a possibility, within a cluster of buildings. Alternatively, radio communications can be used for a building alarm system, avoiding a failure or miscommunication due to damage to cables in a hardwired alarm system.